Theodor Adorno famously said that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” Later, in an essay titled “Commitment,” he responds to critics:

I have no wish to soften the saying that to write lyric poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric; it expresses in negative form the impulse which inspires committed literature. The question asked by a character in Sartre’s play Morts Sans Supulture, ‘Is there any meaning in life when men exist who beat people until the bones break in their bodies?’, is also the question whether any art now has a right to exist; whether intellectual regression is not inherant in the concept of committed literature because of the regression of society. But Enzensberger’s retort also remains true, that literature must resist this verdict, in other words, be such that its mere existence after Auschwitz is not a surrender to cynicism. Its own situation is one of paradox, not merely the one of how to react to it…

…by turning suffering into images, harsh and uncompromising though they are, it wounds the shame we feel in the presence of the victims. For these victims are used to create something, works of art, that are thrown to the consumption of a world which destroyed them. The so-called artistic representation of the sheer physical pain of people beaten to the ground by rifle-butts contains, however remotely, the power to elicit enjoyment out of it. The moral of this art, not to forget for a single instant, slithers into the abyss of its opposite. The aesthetic principle of stylization, and even the solemn prayer of the chorus, make an unthinkable fate appear to have had some meaning; it is transfigured, something of its horror removed. This alone does an injustice to the victims; yet no art which tried to evade them could confront the claims of justice.

So, to make a simple comparison, I would say that to believe in God after Auschwitz is barbaric.

God has often been understood as a supernatural force that orchestrates all events unfolding in the universe. It is by his hand that things follow an understandable, if unpredictable, pattern. Thus, things have meaning. This was the same conception introduced by the first religious peoples, those for whom every major environmental feature presented itself as a deity, each one part of a pantheon of gods. But many contemporary popularizations of this old way of existing in a world of gods are surely mistaken. People did not literally “see” gods all around them. The gods were metaphors used to weave a coherent narrative of the world. Each god was the archetype of a certain set of attitudes or behaviors. Each had its own peculiar agency. One could describe an event to others by telling a story involving gods. But there weren’t gods everywhere. There was “sense” everywhere.

These narratives short-circuited a possible encounter with the senselessness of the Real, with a world of indeterminable scope. By delimiting the possible scope of the world, narratives made the world manageable; since so much of it could thereafter be taken for granted, weaved into a coherent whole, a solid deep structure, one could all the more easily react to day-to-day surface-level changes in the world. Otherwise one would be left without anything to focus on, no focal point around which to structure a general motivation for, or mode of, survival.

Narratives set in place a closed loop of causal explanations, a reservoir, an easy shortcut for explaining all manner of phenomena. But after Auschwitz, such narrativized understandings of the world are barbaric, and stupid. They do an injustice to the power of nature, its inexplicable, terrifying aspects, into which science can only begin to probe. The notions of God in circulation today unfortunately often follow the scheme laid out above. God has a “plan” (for me, my family, my nation, our planet, etc.). Nothing has changed, except that the multiple centers of agency in the polytheistic worldview are now condensed into a singular point containing every possible causal explanation; the monotheistic notion of God condenses into one agency the omniscience and omnipotence at work in any polytheistic scheme before or since.

Gods delimit the space of narrativized reality; they still decide not only what happens within that space (what action or happening is possible or actual), but also what is necessarily outside it (what is impossible or unreal — Lacan’s ‘Real’). Even when gods had foibles, as in Ancient Greece, they played a crucial role in a totalizing narrative, a source of absolute knowledge and power. In fact these foibles make things easier to understand, since they help us relate to the masters of the universe. And that way they’re more likable authority-figures. It’s hard to avoid making the comparison to politics today, in which figures like Berlusconi achieve electoral victories by entertaining the people; information, however powerful, is plain when compared to the drama of hapless and corrupt leaders. In the same way, it took a long time for the stern, sober Christian god to catch on in an ancient Roman world in which the people could worship all manner of interesting characters.

So the question is, what kind of God can there be after Auschwitz? What is a committed notion of God, a committed religion? Maybe we can look to Zizek for guidance here. Is God the divine grace of the Event, the violence of Terror and Love? The force beyond the confines of the vicious cycle of the law and its transgression? If any conception of God can respect the horror of life, then surely it is this one.

The Christian worldview, with its vengeful and violent “God of Abraham” is much more amenable to pushing through programs of centralized authority and crusade. Which would you rather have as a powerful leader, a religion of pagan respect, or one with stories of wrath toward the wicked and salvation for the faithful? If a medieval lord was a CEO, they would have had Christianity head the marketing department.
What is most interesting to me is that monotheism, which originates in the Middle-East and is not somehow an American thing, as right-wingers believe, is now and has been for some time at war with itself.
Jews, Christians, and Muslims all worship the same universal God in the same tradition, but they follow different prophets and Christians are committed to torturing and killing the unsaved. God is love but somehow the effect is war.
As for your point about religion as “delimiting” the world, isn’t this precisely the strength of fundamentalism, whether Jewish, Christian, or Islamic? What one gains from God is security. I had a Christian give me the following argument for God:
God is an entirely actualized being. God does not have “possibility.”
End of dialogue, which is an effort to entertain possibilities. 100% airtight argument, nothing you can say will change the unchangeable, the “fully actual.”
What that is, is security. The fundamentalist always has the upper hand over the scientist, pagan, philosopher, or what have you, because they know something that is totally unshakeable while the rest of us deal with falsifiability, ambiguity/lack of dogma, and critique. The fundamentalist is certain in a world of uncertainty.

That bit about poetry after Auschwitz is just, painful. Yet the proposal to not turn the Holocaust into art seems like an effort to forget the Holocaust. We cannot not speak of it, sing of it, film it, etc.

Likewise, I don’t think its barbaric to retain the notion of God. We cannot forget our religious legacy, instead, we must learn its lessons. The God we experience historically is an infinitely distant God, a silent God, a God that freely chooses to leave us to our freedom. In other words, a God that may as well not exist, a God that is a pure absence.
After such a death of God isn’t the “truly committed” notion of God/religion, one of celebration, joy, and jouissance? Shouldn’t we leave the violence of ego-psychology, dogma, and authority behind and dance in the void?

I agree that we shouldn’t give up the notion of God, of course. That’s what I mean by “committed,” something different than the way it’s seen now. But I don’t think that jouissance is the answer. Absolute jouissance is what politicians like Berlusconi get away with. It’s what Italians see on the TV every day, with pornography masked as a game show. “Dancing in the void,” unfortunately, is exactly what Bakhtin means with the carnivalesque. The carnival is everything and nothing; it’s pure, random enjoyment, without stricture of any kind. The problem is that this is totally apolitical, or even anti-political, since it entertains the masses while tacitly endorsing the existing power structure, reinforcing it by making it bearable, enjoyable. So the problem I see with jouissance as a kind of God-notion is that it reduces the horrific to the enjoyable, obscures its own foundation, ends dialogue, negates criticism.

I agree that the “void” as a political form is essential. The void is usually construed as the absence of certainty, the purest form of democracy. And yet I’m not sure this is exactly what the void is. If the traditional notion of God is one of a totality, of an ultimate, full actuality, then the opposite would be the void of pure possibility, pure potential. This is the void of the Lacanian subject, right? “Dancing” in the void, if it means acknowledging and enjoying the subject’s negating potential, sounds like the proper attitude to have toward the void itself, but it is this void itself that is the horror of Terror and Love.

It’s true that the God of the Old Testament is there to keep order, to make people feel guilty and keep them working. But that God dies in the New Testament, as Jesus on the Cross. Jesus’ ultimate sacrifice was to erase the law and inaugurate Love / Agape as the new foundation of a Christian society. And it’s true that delimiting the world is a key feature of any ideology, religious or not, and that delimiting the world without acknowledging one’s ideological limitations is a fundamentalist worldview.

And certainly, the fundamentalist God is infinitely distant. That’s a great way to put it. So we do need to bring God back down to earth. The question is where this manifestation takes place. My wager is that the manifestation today is in those acts of Terror and Love that occur all the time, if only we have the eyes to see them. (Interestingly, this goes along with message of the documentary on the portrayal of women in Italian television [http://on.fb.me/nXWhHX] — when we mask our faces, we hide our vulnerability, and it is only through this vulnerability that we see God). The Good News is precisely that God is all around, whether in simple glances or mass political upheavals.

I will have to come back to have a more careful read of your comments on the Judeo Christian God. But for now, I will try and address the issue of the God of the Koran, or as Muslims would call Him: “The God of everyone, like it or not”.

I guess in many ways, I think true fundamentalism is impossible: True fundamentalism as far as we are Islamically concerned as it relates to issues of our understanding of God requires that we extrapolate nothing from the linguistics we use to describe him. What I mean is as follows:

God has 99 names given in the Quran. Among them are, The Most Merciful, The Most Powerful, The Most Patient, etc. So we have these names, and yet, we must accept, if we are to be true beleivers, that we have no understanding of the magnitude of what these names indicate. So, Imagine the most patient man you know. God is so far beyond his patience, that we cannot imagine this level of patience. If we take this to its logical conclusion, maybe the patience of God is so great that it looks nothing like our conception of patience. Therefore, at the end of the day these names tell us nothing practically nothing about God, except (what we already knew–he is beyond our imagination).

And yet, even the founder of our religion (Muhammad PBUH), knew that man would not be able to help himself in conceptualizing God in his own terms. I will relate the basic idea of a story which is passed down from him:

The story relates to the judgement day, when we all stand before god. awaiting our deeds to be measured. One of the trials of this day is that a mirage will appear before each human. The mirage contains a figure (human or otherwise). This figure represents what each human IMAGINED God to look like. The figure will then tell the man that he is God, and has come to him. ONLY THE TRUE BELIEVER WILL REFUSE THE MIRAGE AND SAY THAT HE WILL WAIT FOR THE TRUE GOD… or something to that effect.

What does this tell us. To believe in God as a Muslim (my interpretation). Is to believe in something absolute and singular (in whatever form that could mean in the divine sense). But to also accept that it provides an upward bound for our understanding. I believe this sense of God is and should be orienting. But not in such a way as to provide all the answers. But in such a way as to know the questions which are futile to ask, like: “What is God like?”. Muslim Answer”: We don’t know. This is a poing for which Muslims have trouble grasping I believe, in large part because there can be no fundamentalism without living in a vacuum, or creating a vacuum of objectivity for oneself. I don’t think that God provides an absolute source to make sense of the world per say, but I think He does provide a means to accept when no sense can be made…..

Adam, that is really fascinating. Full of great insights and consequences. I particularly like the parable (which could easily be turned into a Zizek joke — great teaching technique), and also what you say about “a vacuum of objectivity.” I’ll have to think about it. It’s great to have someone here who knows Islam!

This conception of God seems to lead to a kind of humility and — oddly enough, considering the fundamentalist strain — a suspicion and rejection of fundamentalist/terrorist ideological obsession/madness.

And yet I suppose the worry would be that one could use this conception to postpone taking any action at all (how can we ever know it’s the right time to revolt?).